


standing in the sun (i am easy to find)

by waferkya



Category: Mayans M.C. (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Episode Tag, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Past Drug Addiction, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 00:31:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21152609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waferkya/pseuds/waferkya
Summary: It's gotta be Angel, right? Nobody else should be allowed to touch Coco at a time like this, when pain has painted the whole world black and his throat is locked and his eyes feel swollen and watery and he’s fucking trembling like a pussy-ass leaf in the winter.





	1. i'm not going anywhere

Gunshots still ringing in his ears, the desert swims in and out of his vision, the faint memory of shitty radio comms and the shiteating grin of his team leader — Coco doesn’t realize right away that he’s standing up.

He can still taste the sand and smoke on his tongue, plus the pain in his arm is bad enough that it’s the only thing he can focus on, as if his entire body shrunk down to three fucking bones and a handful of muscles, tender tissues burning up and smoldering flesh. But he’s upright, he knows he is, there’s a body behind him and someone supporting most of his weight: he can’t smell a thing except the fire and coal and ash off his skin, but if he could, oh, _oh_, he’s ready to bet what’s left of his life that he would smell the tang of sweat and gunpowder and leather and that inexplicable citrusy undertone that Angel carries everywhere on him. It’s gotta be Angel, right? Nobody else has hands this big and warm. Nobody else should be allowed to touch Coco at a time like this, when pain has painted the whole world black and his throat is locked and his eyes feel swollen and watery and he’s fucking trembling like a pussy-ass leaf in the winter.

Fuck.

Coco grinds his teeth and tries not to lean so much of his weight into Angel — and it’s Angel alright, and his soft smoky voice sounds straight out of a dream, even less real than Coco’s fucking war flashbacks. Coco clings onto it like the desperate fucker he is, and pulls himself out of the agony, out of the shock of _being lit on fire_. He’s alright. He needs Angel to stop sounding so scared and worried, it’s making him sick to his stomach. He needs Angel to be fine.

“Jodido hijoputa asqueroso,” Coco breathes out, biting his tongue until he can taste the copper of blood, but still it’s not enough to stop the treacherous tears rolling from his eyes and down his cheeks.

“Fuck, man,” Angel sighs, all relief and a hint of humor. Coco would feel better too, if it wasn’t for the fact that Angel is way too fucking close, his breath scalding hot on the side of Coco’s neck, _as if he hasn’t had enough heat for the rest of his life already_—

Then, Coco opens his eyes and his depth perception is all fucked up, he sees the entire left half of his nose, and he’s way too well-trained not to know what this means.

“I can’t fucking see,” he snarls, like the wounded dog he is. Angel gives a full-body shiver and only wraps his arms around Coco’s waist tighter, while Gilly and EZ both enter his field of vision at once, looking bewildered and terrified.

EZ is ashen, Gilly’s face is turning green and he looks like he’s two seconds away from wagging his fingers in front of Coco’s face to test his eyesight. If he so much as dares lifting a hand, Coco’s gonna bite it off clean.

Angel turns him around forcefully, cups his hands around Coco’s face — ever so sweetly mindful of the open wounds on his cheek — and pulls him in, close enough that their foreheads almost touch. Coco is in pain, probably has second or third-degree burns all over his arm and the side of his face, but still: his stomach flops helplessly and, not for the first nor the hundredth time in this life, he contemplates the idea of leaning in and bite Angel’s lips and suck on his tongue and beg him to fall in love with him.

Some stupid fucking shit, alright.

“For real?” Angel asks, soft and scared. His focus flits from Coco’s good eye to the newly-fucked-up one and back again like there’s a tennis match behind them. Coco can’t bring himself to speak; he nods, jerkily, only once. He doesn’t want to cry anymore but he’s in pain and fucking blind in one eye and his entire life up to this point has been so unfair and hard and complicated and he killed his own mother — would it really be that bad if he just curled up on himself and disappeared forever?

Angel pulls him in for a hug that’s bone-crushing and precisely what Coco wants, precisely what Coco needs — to a certain degree within the realm of possibility, anyway. Coco grabs the back of Angel’s kut and leans into him even more, buries his head against the brick wall of Angel’s shoulder and chest like he’s trying to melt into him. Angel lets him. His hand cups the back of Coco’s head and holds him there.

“I’m so sorry, carnal, I’m so sorry,” he mumbles, his lips pressed hard against Coco’s scalp which probably smells and tastes like burnt human flesh and smoke. Angel doesn’t seem to care. He holds Coco for as long as he needs and pretends he doesn’t hear his wet, noiseless gasps. Angel’s arms are big enough and strong enough to swallow every single one of Coco’s sobs.

The weird thing is, he doesn’t cry — apparently he only had three tears left in him and he already spilled them. What he does is hyperventilate and have a textbook panic attack, but Angel’s heartbeat is steady enough against Coco’s cheek, and he uses that able to ride it out. Pathetic, but efficient: a real Marine. Coco vaguely hears EZ say something about an ambulance, and then Bishop is shouting, and then there’s footsteps and more shouting and swearing, but Angel doesn’t move an inch, so Coco doesn’t worry himself with any of it.

He calms down in a minute or two. He pulls back, and half his body still hurts like a motherfucker, and his eye is still blind, but Angel doesn’t pull his hand away from the curve of Coco’s neck even if he still looks like shit.

“Fuck,” Coco mumbles, and raises tentative fingers to the damaged part of his face. He wants to feel the open wounds, assess the damage, and get the fuck over it. Angel bats him away, then puts his hand back to keep Coco grounded or some sentimental shit like that. “How do I look? Is the moneymaker alright?”

Angel actually laughs at that. “You’re still the fairest of ’em all, carnal, don’t worry.”

Coco gives him a full-toothed grin. Then they hear sirens and they find out about Riz, so mirth and anything of the sort is going to stay out of their lives for a while. Coco’s fucked up body is a vessel for revenge now, all he can take is hate and violence and righteous rage; and of course, the weight and heat of Angel’s hand at the crook of his neck.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’m a very sad predictable person so i made [a spotify playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6TbhvLkrExy85eVBEK4e1v?si=4AGHHkOCQFSv87_7YPXDZg)
> 
> WHERE IS THIS GOING, you ask? who the fuck knows. i needed a safe space parallel to canon, though, to fill it up with FEELINGS and ANGST and possibly in the near future HOT BOYS MAKING OUT. yeah.


	2. a million little battles i'm never gonna win

When the ambulance gets there, Coco is adamant that he does not want to get on the stretcher, he’s not a fucking invalid, he can sit like a normal person. Angel gives him a look, his lips pulled in a tight line, like he’s disappointed. Coco sticks his tongue out at him through the back window of the ambulance, and he sees EZ and Gilly laugh, but Angel doesn’t, and it sucks — then the EMT thinks it’s a good idea to pull on his burned up arm, and Coco’s eyes roll to the back of his head from the pain.

He thinks about Angel, and he wonders if now that he’s blind, Angel will finally grow tired of being his friend. Is this the thing that’ll make him realize, after years of denial, that he’s way too fucking cool to still hang out with someone like Coco?

Coco is not a complete fucking moron, and he knows that his proclivities would make him very few friends in this little corner of the world where he lives. You cut a Santo Padre boy open and he’ll bleed testosterone and quotes from the Bible, and the Lord doesn’t care much for people like him.

When he was old enough to understand he had a problem, he made a vow to never slip, not even once in his life. He promised la Santa Madre that he would never let his eyes linger, never cave in to the temptation of following a truck driver into a dark alley, no matter how far in the desert they were, no matter how certain Coco would be that the attention and the interest was reciprocated. You never know, you know?

Most of his adolescence, he was simmering. As soon as his balls dropped he knew Celia would smell something wrong on him like a fucking bloodhound, and it’s not like he can’t appreciate a nice rack or a nice smile anyway, so he started picking up girls, same as everyone else. Booze and smack helped a little, and the best thing about nice, good Catholic girls is that they’d die before they tell anyone they let you put it up their ass.

He was headed for the gutter, he can see it now: the scars between his toes where he went scavenging for a good vein tell a miserable fucking tale, and Coco thinks maybe he knew it even back then, towards the end. He tried to rob a bodega in his own fucking hood, face bare, lips cracked bloody, hands shaking from the weight of a gun he couldn’t remember buying. He was fifteen and he couldn’t see a way out of his misery, except in the tangible bliss that came with cheap heroin.

The stint in juvie straightened him out, at least. He was so busy going out of his mind from withdrawal that he never even noticed being surrounded by boys all day and night — big boys, tattooed boys, angry and turbulent boys, exactly his type of boys and probably even made more lenient to the idea of getting a blowjob from another guy, given the lack of an alternative, but Coco’s libido was shot to shit, he couldn’t even contemplate the idea of arousal, let alone feeling like getting on his knees. He was scrawny back then, worse than now, but he’s always been a vicious fighter, and his crazy eyes kept him safe. He got into a lot of fights, got shivvied a couple of times (and made sure to return the favor as soon as the docs set him loose again), but never anything worse.

All in all, Coco’s gotta admit he’s been lucky. He joined the Marines fresh out of jail, at the summer fair: the recruiting officer saw him shoot out an entire row of rubber ducks to win a giant bear for toddler Letty, and it took all of five minutes to sweet-talk Coco into signing away his life to the Corps. What can he say? He has a thing for men in uniforms.

Under arms, it went like this: don’t ask, don’t tell. Easy peasy, and for a while Coco even thought about getting it tattooed on his knuckles, except it would be a bit obvious, wouldn’t it?

He used to come up with the best, most graphic homoerotic jokes just to make his teammates laugh, and he enjoyed the odd squirming discomfort from the more conservative nerds (they were always, always white boys, those ones), and that was his way of coping.

One night, he was keeping watch in the middle of Fucksville, Nowhere, and this guy from another company comes up behind him, Coco almost shoots him from how quiet he’s been. He sees the colors and sees the face, which he half-recognizes from some camp somewhere, and calms down. The guy crouches next to him in the sand, he’s older than Coco, he’s a black man and an officer, and he wants to look at Coco but he doesn’t. He just stays there, staring out into enemy territory, and doesn’t say a thing. Coco is getting unnerved.

“Alright, sir?” he asks, his voice rough from the sand and the silence. The officer stirs, finally turns his head around, and he stares at Coco with these giant brown eyes. He nods, stands up and walks away, mumbling an apology. To this day Coco doesn’t know for sure what the fuck that was about, but a part of him can guess: the officer was this close to break the second rule, don’t tell, don’t ever tell, don’t fucking ever tell anyone. Coco is glad he didn’t. He loves his plausible deniability; he really does.

So, fast-forward two tours later, and the Corps send him back home with mandatory leave for a while, because some pussy-ass child-fucking liberal decided it’s not okay for men to be in combat too long. Coco is offended. He knows what he would say, if anyone ever bothered to ask his opinion: bull-motherfucking-shit. Some people peak in high school; he peaks in battle. He thrives under the structure, the routine; it grounds him. It’s the only thing that shuts up the noise in his head.

But the policies don’t know about his mental health — and would they even care if they did? — so Coco comes home and he’s terrified he’ll fall into the same old shit, back to his friends spoon and needle. No, it’s worse than that: he _knows_ he will. Someone at some point told him you never really stop being an addict, you just cope with it better, and those words stuck with him. That’s who he is, that’s who he’ll always be.

He can’t stand being around Celia, he can’t stand being around Letty either. It breakes his heart but he moves the fuck out. He hates himself and he turns to the bottle because of all the things he craves, it seems like the least dangerous.

And then he slips. Of course.

He’s drunk at his usual shitty joint, and there’s this bachelor party in from San Jose, heading to TJ in the morning. They’re loud and obnoxiously happy, but they’re loaded with cash and hitting on all the girls and paying rounds for the entire floor, so the owner of the place tolerates them gladly. It doesn’t hurt that they look like they rolled out of some fucking underwear magazine spread, too.

Coco has been staring at them for a while because the tv is set on a basketball game he doesn’t give two shits about, and they’re the next most entertaining thing. The groom is trying to drink tequila from a shot glass perched between a local girl’s enormous tits. And, Coco’s vision might be swimming — the patron gave up and just left him the bottle two hours ago — but he’s pretty sure one of those guys is looking back more and more often.

He’s so fucked up, his first thought is that this guy must be looking for a fight. Coco is not one to back down, he never was: truth be told, he can’t fucking wait to throw a couple of punches, taste his own blood. When the guy meets his eye again, Coco grins, feral and threatening. It works. The guy stands up on wobbly, drunk knees and walks over. It’s that point of the night were nobody gives a fuck and they’re all smoking inside. Coco stubs out his cigarette and cracks the joints on his left hand in anticipation. The guy pulls out a cigarette and asks him for his lighter. Coco is taken aback, but his hands are complying with the request before his brain can catch up. He lights the cigarette and in the red-orange hue of his Zippo, Coco realizes that the guy is fucking making eyes at him.

Who the fuck just dumped a bucket of ice water on his head? Nobody, of course, it didn’t happen, just like the sky did not crack open to rain God’s judgement all over him, but to Coco, it might’ve as well had. He’s suddenly sober and he wants to say, _the fuck you want?_ Instead he says, “You got a name?” and then promptly forgets the answer, but the guy looks pleased he bothered to ask.

Coco gets a spectacular blowjob in the toilet, then he pushes the guy against the wall and tries to eat his mouth. He feels so good. He can’t keep his hands still. The guy moans and sighs and pulls at his hair, — it’s just starting to grow out of the shitty regulation haircut, — he smiles into Coco’s bruising kisses and seems to enjoy a little rough play. Coco sends a silent prayer up to the Heavens: if this is the only time in his life he’s allowed to have this, it’s pretty fucking great.

“So it’s true what they say about you San Jose pretty boys,” Coco murmurs without thinking. When the guy laughs, his eyes crinkle at the corners. Coco runs his thumb across his cheek, something sweet, almost tender. The guy kisses the palm of his hand. Then he realizes that Coco is hard again, and he looks pretty impressed.

The bachelor party came in an actual minivan. Coco fucks him hard and apparently in all the right ways: the guy makes these absolutely obscene noises, wet and deep from his throat. Coco knows he’ll jack off to this night for the rest of his life (except he doesn’t know shit).

When he zips up his jeans after, his hands are shaking a little, and he’s flushed and almost giddy. He’s doing his best not to think about tomorrow and the day after that and then the day after that. He’s already compartmentalizing. He slips out of the van before the guy has had the time to get dressed. He wants to scoot, find another club and another bottle, except a group of three people is coming out of the bar.

Coco freezes halfway through buckling his belt.

Across the parking lot, Angel Reyes stops whispering dirty nothings in the ear of the girl under his arm, and meets Coco’s eyes for a second. He takes in Coco’s flushed cheeks, the shirt hanging out of his pants, his messed up hair. They don’t know each other, but it’s a man’s code: if a brother is coming out of a minivan looking like he obviously just had the best fuck of his life, you acknowledge him. Simple as that. Angel is all for tradition and respect, so he smiles a little, and nods towards Coco, _good for you, man_. Then his head tilts to point at the girls he has under each arm, _my night’s not going bad either_.

Coco’s heart is in his throat, and he chalks it up to the fact that this stranger — this tall stranger, this tattooed stranger, this handsome stranger with the million dollar smile and the ridiculous swagger — could probably break him over his knee if he wanted. What the fuck does he know, that he just met _Angel Reyes_? He’s not a fucking witch. He can’t tell what this means. Coco finds enough nerve to nod back and put together some sort of grin; it would be rude not to, and Coco abides by the code.

The guy in the van chooses this exact moment, the worst possible moment, to climb out. Coco doesn’t realize it at first; of course, he’s too taken drinking in every little detail of Angel’s stupidly attractive face. But he sees Angel’s eyes widen just a fraction, and his sinful mouth drop open a little in surprise, and this is where Coco’s blood turns to ice. _Christ_, he’s been so good all his life, and then the first time he gives in—

But Angel collects himself in a heartbeat. He breezes past the surprise and dives head-first into acceptance: his lips curl up again in that small, conspiratorial smile, and then he’s pulling his girls towards a shitty old car, and then he’s gone.

Coco’s throat is dry. The guy from the van touches his arm tentatively, and he has this empathetic look in his eyes that Coco can’t stand. He pulls away and walks home. What a fucking night, right?

He was terrified but it’s nothing compared to the full-on dread he feels a couple of days later, when he meets Angel in the cereal aisle at the supermarket. It’s broad daylight, but they’re at the back of the shop and the thick shape at the side of Angel’s jeans is clearly a badly concealed knife. He’s here with a couple of bored-looking friends, and Coco genuinely thinks this is an ambush. He always thought he’d go out in Motherfuckingstan, blaze and glory, taking as many hajis with him as he could. Instead he’s going to die between the cocoa puffs and the power bars, and it’s kinda fitting after all: his life was shit, it should also have a shit ending.

Angel sees him, recognizes him, and smiles. He pulls a box of Lucky Charms off the shelf.

“Yo,” he tells Coco, because he’s a fucking poet.

Coco is having a stroke. “Hey, man,” he mumbles, still waiting for the knife to come out. Instead, Angel’s smile just grows bigger. He looks at his friends, who look like a bunch of cookie-cutter asshole jocks and there’s no way he doesn’t know it too, then back to Coco.

“D’you wanna smoke?” he asks, and he even mimes the act of smoking a joint, making this popping sound with his lips, and it’s so fucking ridiculous that Coco has gotta laugh in his face.

“Man, you can’t just ask anyone that,” he says, and he’s breathless from how much he’s laughing, but Angel doesn’t seem offended by it.

“I’m not asking anyone, I’m asking you.” That’s some bulletproof logic.

“I could be a cop for all ya know,” Coco points out. Angel gives him a very obvious once over and raises his eyebrows. _Looking like that?_, he doesn’t have to say. Coco kinda bristles. “They come in all sizes and colors now.”

“Okay,” Angel nods. “Are you a cop?”

For a brief second, Coco considers lying. Except he couldn’t stand the idea of passing for a pig, not even for a second, not even for a joke. “Nah.”

Angel awards him a big, brilliant smile. “I knew it. C’mon. I’ll ditch those huevonazos and then we can go.”

“Why do you even bother with those guys, man,” Coco hears himself saying before his brain has given his mouth the green light to speak. He’s shaking his head, too. Wonderful idea, insulting a guy’s friends three minutes into the conversation.

Angel rolls his eyes. “My baby brother’s friends,” he says, as if that explains anything — weirdly, though, Coco gets it.

They smoke in Angel’s car, behind a half-collapsed old school. Two drags in, and Coco is smitten with this weird, gentle giant who could undo his fucking life with a very short sentence, but doesn’t seem interested at all in doing so. Angel doesn’t recoil from his shitty sense of humor; when Coco says something horribly dark, he stops for a second, but then he always, always laughs. His eyes crinkle at the corners too, but Coco never once compares him to the guy from the van. How could he? It would be borderline insulting. Who the fuck would ever compare the ocean to the drippings of a faucet?

They click in a weird way, and becoming friends comes natural even to Coco who has never had a friend in his life (smack buddies don’t count). Angel makes it easy. He gets comfortable in the hollow routine of Coco’s days, taking up space in both his house and his head. He’s affectionate and just so fucking amicable and good, he genuinely likes trashy reality shows and junk food, and even if they enjoy drinking and smoking themselves stupid, somehow, for some reason, if he’s with Angel, Coco never feels the urge to really go overboard.

He can’t tell that he’s happy, and not just falling but plunging into love, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

In the few weeks following the chance encounter at the supermaket, Angel goes by the rules. He doesn’t ask, ever. Coco is glad for it at first, but then it starts to unnerve him: he feels like they’re building a friendship and, for once, he hates the thought of lying, of hiding himself. He thinks more and more often about the black officer in the desert, that hungry look on his face, how desolate he seemed when he walked away without having spoken his truth.

Angel doesn’t ask, but Coco tells. He’s nervous about it too, even though it’s fucking stupid: he knows that Angel knows, he _saw_ Coco with that guy, no way he misunderstood that; plus, Coco has already come clean about some of the worst shit in his life — the drugs, and juvie, and the noise inside his head, and Letty, mostly Letty, — and never once has Angel judged him. He’s always been understanding and brotherly and he even cracked a few cruel jokes, which made him Coco like him even more. So, why the fuck would Coco be nervous about restating the obvious? Dios lo sabe. And yet, he is.

He downs half a bottle of tequila in half an hour, the night he’s decided to tell him. He’s going back for his third tour in a few days: if Angel decides to spit in his face and beat him to a pulp and stone him like the Scripture would have him do, Coco, who doesn’t have the guts to kill himself — he knows, he tried, — can count on the opportunity to blow himself up in the Middle East.

By now, Angel can read him like a fucking book. (It goes both ways: Coco knows everything about Angel and his family. Angel has explained it to him three hundred times but Coco still can’t understand how the fuck could his parents prefer the baby brother to him; how could they look through Angel and find him unimpressive and disappointing, Angel with his kind-as-fuck heart, Angel who doesn’t fuck drunk girls, Angel who slaved away in his father’s shop since he was old enough to lift a pound of meat, Angel who’s funny and confident and turns heads wherever he goes. When Coco said all that, Angel’s face flushed bright red and he couldn’t meet his eyes; he blamed the weed, said it was too strong, and Coco actually believed him, because remember? Coco doesn’t know shit.)

“What is it, hermano?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow to make a curious, worried face.

“I fucked that guy,” Coco blurts out, because he’s a faggot and an addict and a shitty father who’s lying to his daughter, so he doesn’t wanna add coward to that list. “The night we met. At the bar. You pro’lly don’t even remember—”

“I remember,” Angel says, quietly. He’s peeling the label from his beer, which is sitting on his stomach, pointing up and outwards, and Coco is trying very hard not to let his graphic imagination run wild. “You really think I wouldn’t remember?”

“Dunno,” Coco mumbles. “You’re a busy man.”

Angel laughs and shoves at his arm. “And you’re very stupid, you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Coco says. Angel’s smile softens, he tilts his head to the side. He takes the tequila away from Coco.

“I won’t tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“No, it’s not—” Coco thinks about it for a second. “Yeah, please don’t tell anyone.” Angel laughs, then nods. “But… I mean. Obviously, I know you remembered. I just wanted to… y’know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Angel says, but he’s still laughing. Coco should get offended, this isn’t a big joke, but actually, it makes him feel better. He’s always better when he can make Angel laugh. “But look—thanks for telling me. It means a lot, yeah?”

“Man, you know the day I kill my mother, I’ll ask you to help me hide the body,” Coco says, rolling his eyes. “I trust you. Don’t fucking know why, but I do.”

Angel puts his hand around Coco’s face, half on his cheek and half around his head. His thumb brushes way too close to Coco’s lips; his ring flicks Coco’s earlobe teasingly. He’s giving Coco _a look_, and Coco is melting from the inside into something hot and pathetic, and from this moment on he won’t ever be able to lie to himself. He doesn’t just adore this man. Angel Reyes is the love of his life.

Good thing Coco’s shipping out to die in the war.

Of course, he doesn’t. He’s a tough motherfucker and it would take a lot more than ancient rifles and a few IED to kill him. Even _catching fire_ doesn’t kill him: instead it lands him in a hospital, being wheeled in haste through the corridors and with the prettiest nurse he’s ever seen scrambling around his stretcher, calling all sorts of doctors to try and save his eye.

When he comes to, Coco feels dizzy and strangely blissful. He’s been lost inside his head for what feels like a lifetime. Maybe he’s dying and that’s why he started thinking about the past? He read somewhere that the brain gives up all the happy hormones right before it’s about to die.

He asks the nurse: “Am I dying?” and she stops for a second and smiles sweetly down at him.

“Not at all, cariño, don’t worry. You just passed out in the ambulance.”

Coco wants to nod in acknowledgement but his neck is stiff and it hurts and actually, he doesn’t want to move at all. There’s a loud commotion somewhere he can’t see, but from the sound of heavy boots and half-yelled Spanish curses he knows what it’s about: a moment longer and Angel is at his side, grabbing Coco’s good wrist in a way that’s painful but he wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world.

“Hey, I’m right here,” Angel says, and his tone implies that he’s a miracle doctor, the most skilled healer in all the land, and now that he’s here nothing can go wrong. Of course, Coco believes him. “The docs’ll take good care of you, yeah?”

“Mhmhh,” Coco mumbles, and he can tell his lips are smiling. He has to tilt his head a little bit to see Angel: his neck still hurts but he’s willing to endure it if it means taking a good, proper look at Angel’s handsome face. EZ and Gilly are here too. Coco is happy to see them, and he yells it: “Good to see you, fuckers!” They’re not as good as Angel at reading him, you know? He needs to tell them this shit.

The nurse is not happy about the three very large men that just commandeered her stretcher.

“Nooo, don’t yell at them, they’re my friends,” Coco says, not realizing how slurred his words are. With his free hand — his burned, fucked up hand — he points to Angel and whisper-shouts: “He was my first friend.”

Angel is staring at the nurse. “You gave him something?”

“He has third-degree burns all over his arm and face. Of course I—”

Coco doesn’t hear the rest of the conversation, because cotton candy has taken over his ears and it feels fucking amazing. He’s fifteen again, hallucinating that he can fly, weightless and free. Shit, he hasn’t felt this good for so long.

Why did he ever stop hanging out with the Big H, man?

(Here is what Angel and the nurse are fighting about: he’s yelling that Coco has had a problem with hard drugs, but he’s dealing with it, he’s been good for a long time, and if they gave him opioids they could’ve just fucked up his life. The nurse feels guilty as fuck but she didn’t know, she says; they’ll switch meds as soon as possible, they’ll keep an eye on him, but he has to go to surgery now, for his eye and the burns; Angel grabs her by the forearms and makes her promise, makes her swear, no more morphine, no more opioids, he can give her a fucking list of alternatives—

And she promises, she swears, but he needs to stand down now.

Angel is breathing hard as the stretcher is rolled away from him. EZ comes up behind him, puts a hand on his shoulder.

“He’ll be fine, Angel,” he says, and Angel grits his teeth and tries to believe it.)  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the titles in this fic so far are from the song "I am easy to find" by The National.


End file.
